By Erin Wetterhahn
Port Washington author Michael Jan Friedman has spent decades writing stories about some of science fiction’s most famous characters, including those from Star Trek, Batman and Superman. Now, the veteran writer and familiar face on Long Island’s comic convention circuit is creating a superhero universe of his own with *The Company of Enhanced Beings*, a collection of interconnected stories that recently surpassed its Kickstarter fundraising goal.
Before Michael Jan Friedman could even read, comics were a part of his life.
It was his parents, who would read to him, that introduced him to a lifelong love for the Legion of Super-Heroes comics. The series was the first time kids were portrayed as superheroes, besides being sidekicks or younger versions of older superheroes, and Friedman, being a 5-year-old reader at the time, was entranced.
“When you’re a little kid, you want to belong to something,” Friedman said. “And these characters in the Legion of Super-Heroes were very accepting of each other, even though they were from different planets and they looked different and had different powers. They were very accepting of each other, and it was a very friendly environment for a little kid.”
Friedman, 71, is a New York native who grew up in Queens, but currently lives in Port Washington. His wife is from Nassau County and they both fell in love with the town, so when they were moving from Key Gardens, it was an easy choice.
“It’s a great town,” he said. “And it’s a great community.”
He always wanted to write, but that didn’t seem like an actual career. No one around was a writer.
“I didn’t even know anyone who knew anyone who was a writer,” he said.
But like any author, Friedman had a good eye, he saw names of authors and knew somewhere, somehow, someone was a writer.
“For a kid from Queens, it just didn’t seem like it was in the cards,” said Friedman.
But when he got older, something changed. Isaac Asimov, “probably the most prolific writer that we’ve ever had,” held a lecture at Friedman’s college, the University of Pennsylvania. Friedman asked him if he wrote full time and Asimov said yes. After years of the elusive writer career, there one was in the flesh. Friedman was an undergraduate English Lit major and has a graduate degree in journalism from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School.
Friedman started writing soon after; inspired by Asimov. It was the push he needed to dive deep into his work and he began to write novels to fulfill independent studies in college. Professors were encouraging but the market wasn’t looking for a random 20-year-old’s novel.
However, Friedman met a fellow student whose family owned a literacy agency. And he told Friedman “when you graduate and you write your first novel, come to me.”
So, Friedman did and he was referred to another literary agency and another one after that. The final one took him on as a writer and they sold his first book to Warner Bros.
“I got the word when I was working for a business magazine,” Friedman said. “And I felt higher than the skyscrapers as I made my way to the subway.”
Friedman is now the author of more than 80 books and nearly 200 comic stories. Much of his work falls into the science fiction and fantasy genres, including dozens of novels set in the Star Trek universe. He has also written stories featuring Batman, Superman and the X-Men, along with original fiction, movie adaptations and nonfiction books.
He currently publishes and promotes his work through Crazy 8 Press, which is a collective of writers who decided to cut out the middleman. It was important to the authors to preserve the link between the reader and the writer, regardless of whether publishers or retailers were involved.
According to Friedman, the short story format is ideal for science fiction. And while he hadn’t written many short stories over the course of his career, he recently had the short story bug.
“You can get in, you can say what you have to say, and you can get out and still have a lot of impact,” Friedman said.
That’s how he came across the idea for “The Company of Enhanced Being.” Friedman was writing collections of short stories and had the idea for a series of letters between one mother to another about their children who are in a superhero legion. It turns into a mystery as the two women realize their information is not lining up.
After that, Friedman had another idea in that universe and afterward, another one came. So, he finally conceded and decided to write a full novel on these heroes. The project will include 12 stories in the volume and are all new ideas. The stories take place at different times throughout the universe, without much linkage.
The future of these heroes is dependent on Friedman’s interest. At the moment, he’s pretty stretched out in terms of ideas for the group. But he believes more stories will come.
The next step is to finish the project. A Kickstarter fundraiser Friedman launched exceeded its goal of $3,500 and that showed him people were interested. The different donation tiers provide different rewards; one tier gets you written somewhere in the volume. So, Friedman is now wrapping up those stories.
“I’ve done a lot of [Kickstarters], and it always feels good to fund,” he said. “But in this case, maybe a little more so, because we went over our goal by so much. And that’s, you know, that’s a vote of confidence.”
Photo: Cover of The Company of Enhanced Beings by Michael Jan Friedman. (Courtesy of Michael Jan Friedman)
Erin Wetterhahn is a reporter with The SBU Media Group, part of Stony Brook University’s School of Communication and Journalism’s Working Newsroom program for students and local media.
